I don’t know what you pay attention to on the internet. Between you and me, I try not to pay attention to a whole lot because I find that most of what I see, I end up wishing I could unsee. Anyway, there’s been some minor rumblings recently that I’m really interested in because they concern the genre we all read and review. It seems there’s been some talk of a bit of an exodus from the MM Romance/Gay Fiction reading community.
Why?
Well, I’ve seen a variety of reasons offered for it: some readers say they’re tired of the same old regurgitated tropes in contemporary romance, some think there’s been a decline in the quality of the stories, especially those being traditionally published (which has brought some attention to self-published authors and LiveJournal enthusiasts), while some say they’re just plain old tired of the glut of endlessly whiney characters being thrown out there for our consumption lately. But do you know what I find more than slightly amusing about this, in my own “wow, how ironic” kind of way? Those are all the exact same reasons I gave for my defection from M/F Romance a few years ago! Pfft. Weird. I guess it just goes to prove the old adage that what goes around comes around. Either that or it shows that, just like with any diet, the mass and unvaried consumption of one particular brain-food group is bound to, sooner or later, start leaving a bad aftertaste in your gray matter, and leave you craving something else. For all I know, it could be both. Or it could be that we readers are a fickle lot. I don’t know. At any rate, I feel pretty fortunate that I’ve been mostly immune to it thus far; at least so far as to say I’m not ready to give up on the genre. All I know is that in this fictional niche of which I’m admittedly a little bit possessive and protective, (which, hello, have you noticed is going through a huge growth explosion in both readers and authors?) I don’t want to see quality sacrificed for quantity. More does not always equal better. Now don’t say, “Well, duh.” You know it’s true.
But let’s get back to that whole “regurgitated tropes” comment I made before. To be perfectly honest, I don’t see this as a M/M genre exclusive issue. Honestly, I think there are simply universal truths and cosmic contingencies that say, hey, here we all are and when you pare us down to our most basic selves, we’re really not all that different. Love and romance may not be an exact science, but chemistry and physics play a huge part in the experiment and is something we all have in common. Does that mean contemporary romance is doomed to be the same old, same old. Maybe, because really, when it comes down to it there just aren’t a lot of ways to vary the human experience, so I don’t know that I see it as lack of variety as much as it’s an abundance of product where there was, at one time, not so much to choose from. But that’s just me and my wonky thoughts on the matter.
Which leads me to the review-ish portion of the blah-blah-blah. So, let’s discuss the Jock/Nerd/Social Outcast trope, shall we? I’ve seen it done and done brilliantly in John Goode’s Tales from Foster High series. For me, these books are the absolute pinnacle of the theme. These are the books that I will forever compare this storyline against, and to be honest, so far everything has paled somewhat in the comparing. Does that mean it should be scrapped as a tired and recycled plot device? Absolutely not. But for me, if it’s going to be done and I’m going to read it, it’s going to have to be damn near flawless in its execution because I’ve read, again for me, what I consider to be the best. Is that fair? I don’t know, but it’s all I’ve got to work with, so I’m going with it.
Which now leads me to Sara Alva’s debut novel, Social Skills, the story of Connor, an eighteen-year-old college freshman and gifted musician who suffers from a crippling case of social anxiety; and the mediocre-at-best football player, Jared, who Connor has been hired to tutor in Anthropology.
Connor’s painful introversion, which he bears only through a sort of self-practicing music therapy, plays out as a deep contrast to Jared’s popular extroversion, which at times is itself more practiced artifice than a natural part of his personality. The building of their tenuous-at-best relationship plays out as a study of the built in difficulties in pretending you’re someone you’re not, of hiding in the closet, all for the sake of fear and of preserving a traditional public persona in a meatheaded, macho-ass, homophobic world. I liked Connor and Jared and was glad when they finally found their footing, but here’s where my problem with this book exists and why, in the end, I can’t give it a higher rating: I don’t think the premise supported the word count. Social Skills is more than three-hundred pages long, but when I boiled it down to its simplest themes and what I took away from the story, there was really only about a novella’s worth of significant plot there for me, and the rest labored a bit under the idea that nothing else needed to happen but to showcase all the stereotypical characters that could possibly populate a college campus. It was the socio-anthropological study of the teenage social structure, which did a lot of pointing out the obvious, and that’s pretty much it. Simply put, the story was predictable, which isn’t bad, per se—I mean, Connor and Jared eventually getting their HFN was what I ultimately wanted, and I got it. Connor and Jared saved this book for me—no, what I mean by predictable is that the reader knows these two boys are going to get together, which is good. But the reader also knows they’re going to have their short but sweet moment of bliss and then the bloom is going to rot right off the stem because publicly denying the one and only person who knows you for who you really are is a recipe for disaster. The reader knows that in order for the relationship to have any chance of working out, these two boys were going to have to spend some time apart figuring out who they are, deciding what was important to them, growing and making some changes, and ultimately figuring out who they wanted to be for each other. And the reader knows they’ll eventually get it all figured out. And that’s why, for me, this was a good read instead of great; it employed some common tropes in teenage drama but didn’t do anything more to make those themes special or unique in its 95,460 words.
So, while this is a case where a common M/M theme didn’t quite work for me, I’m not at all saying I wouldn’t recommend this book because, as I said, I did like Connor and Jared a great deal. They were sweet and conflicted and I was really rooting for them. I’m only saying that for me, the storytelling weighed in as just average, not that I expected a reinvention of the wheel, mind you, but I had hoped for at least a little new tread on the tires.
And that’s my universal truth.
You can buy Social Skills here: 
Good review of Social Skills. Sounds like an interesting enough book. I like/love anything to do with mental health, so anxieties, of any description, usually grab me – along with depression, self-harm, personality disorders etc etc etc. However, I very rarely read books with younger guys (solely) in them. It’s a rare, freezing day in my part of the world when I read College-type books. I do, but they have to be exceptional. Think I’m getting old :)
As for the fisrt part of your blog – as you implied so well – there is nothing new under the sun. I enjoy M/M because I find good writer’s can push the envelope more, simply because it is men. And there are a number of very good writers writing in this genre. I tend to mix my genres up, just finished a YA novel, if I do that I have a better reading experience, with less opportunity of feeling stale. No matter what, I always come back to LGBT writing, it is my favourite.
Cheers!
Thanks for taking the time to chat, Kazza. :)
I love books that feature characters with disabilities too, and it doesn’t matter to me whether they’re emotional or physical afflictions. Those already built in conflicts just tugs at my heart, but then, I’ve also been accused of being overly sentimental, so there’s that too. LOL.
Connor’s shyness and anxiety were almost painful, but that’s really what made me love him, and was why I loved Jared. Jared saw something in Connor that no one else saw. I just wish there’d been…less. And it’s not often that I’ve said that.
I’m still as devoted to M/M as I’ve ever been. I think any genre that’s grown as quickly as this one is bound to have some pains, good and bad. I also think anyone who reads obsessively is bound to go through dry spells. We’ve all been there, I think. :)
Cheers, Lisa :)
Some of us are trying to get find a way of promoting the fiction with gay protagonists where the emphasis is on plot and there is less or no sexual content. I don’t know if you saw an article on Library Journal recently where Josh Lanyon and Alex Beecroft were cited as examples of authors who write M/M erotica. I don’t know how Mr Lanyon feels about it but Alex was very sad. She’s tried so hard to escape that label. Anyhow, I’ve started groups on Facebook and Goodreads and am trying to generate some interest. It just seems so daft to have a 400 page novel labeled as erotica for a 2 page sex scene. Mainstream novels aren’t treated like that.
Wow! I’ve read and loved both Josh’s and Alex’s work and can say with utter certainty that I’d never consider labeling them as erotic authors. Clearly that article was written by a journalist who’s never read true erotica. But, you know, sometimes I wonder if all M/M Romance is lumped into that sub-genre simply because it’s two men having sex (or being in a relationship, for that matter) rather than a man and a woman. It has nothing to do with content and everything to do with context.
I’ve read books over the years that I thought were extremely seductive (Ginn Hale’s Wicked Gentlemen comes to mind) that didn’t include any on-screen sex at all, yet there were moments in that book that felt very erotic to me. I’d never label it erotica in a million years, though. A lot of it may simply be perception–what I find tame, someone else finds erotic.
Elin, if you give me links to your Goodreads and Facebook pages, I’d love to do my part to help promote them. :)
Oh bless you! That would be grand. Here’s Facebook and here’s Goodreads.
I’m very anxious that people might think that setting up this group is some kind of value judgement about erotica – it’s really not. I think that some erotica is brilliant and very much enjoy reading it – for instance, Jo Myles “Hot Floor” was a hoot and I loved “Screwing the System”. The groups are marketing tools – an attempt to let the right reader find the right book by providing a little bit more information. It’s such a pity to see a terrific novel marked down by a reader because she was expecting oodles of red hot rumpy pumpy held together by a feather light plot and got oodles of red hot plotty action and just one or two exquisite but brief sex scenes. Expectations count for a lot.
I’ll put a post together right away, Elin. I just sent a request to join the FB group and already there’s a book I want to discuss! My Review of As Meat Loves Salt I loved/hated that book beyond all reason. It’s one of my all time favorite books for that very reason. It’s brilliant!
Thanks so much for the links. :)
Never read Josh Lanyon. Adore Alex Beecroft’s work. I remember posting in a review ‘that if you think Blessed Isle is about hot sex on an island you’ll be disappointed.’ Why? Because people will mark it down. It’s total rubbish that people would do this… but it’s what they do. I gave a siuilar ‘no sex’ spiel on Rodney Ross’s wonderful LGBT book, The Cool Part of His Pillow. Because once M/M gets thrown into the loop it seems to be an expectation from more than a few people that sex is a given.
Kazza, I’ve read so many reviews on Goodreads where perfectly good books have been slammed because there was little to no sex. I read a review once where the reader low-balled the book because the characters’ sexual relationship never progressed to the anal stage. Apparently oral wasn’t quite good enough. Those sorts of things make me feel badly for the author because it brings down their overall rating. If someone doesn’t bother reading reviews and chooses books based solely on their star rating, that could potentially hurt the writer.
I know sites like All Romance eBooks and publishers like Riptide give details about sexual content/frequency/heat ratings. Makes me think other publishers and e-tailers should consider doing that too, so readers aren’t disappointed by too much/too little sex.
Oh! And if you’ve never read Josh, may I recommend his Adrien English series? It’s brilliant. :-D
You are absolutely correct, publishers that have a ‘heat rating’ or ‘content rating’ are giving the reader (and the writer) a better service. I actually read Mexican Heat, I forgot that, which was a co-write between Josh Lanyon and Laura Baumbach. Thanks for the recommendation, Lisa. I have seen the Adrien English series but they have never grabbed me for some reason. I think it’s because I’m terrible with series, with some exceptions.
I really liked Mexican Heat a lot and am disappointed it doesn’t seem there’s going to be any sequels.
Adrien and Jake are probably not for everyone. I can definitely see that. I’ve really liked Josh’s “Holmes and Moriarity” books too, but again, that’s a series. I’ve read some great reviews of his Come Unto These Yellow Sands, which I own but haven’t gotten around to reading it yet. Too many books, too little time. :-P
This is a fascinating discussion, Lisa. I read your post on Erin’s groups and decided to come see what had prompted it :). It’s actually something that came up in an essay I wrote last semester, where I caught myself in the same circle: where do you draw the lines between Romance, Erotica, and Erotic Romance? I like J.M.’s way of describing it: “And I don’t shy away from the sex, either (though some people say I don’t write enough). Gay erotic romance, you could call it. Works for me.”
That said, I actually wanted to leave a comment on the review portion of your post, rather than the meta-discussion. Concerning brilliantly-done college (or in this case, high school) stories: Have you read Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan? That book is my version of your Tales from Foster High. Every gay YA piece I write has to be compared against it–which is why you haven’t seen any of my YA work, because it doesn’t measure up (yet). It’s more gay fiction than M/M (another fun distinction), but it’s really, really worth the read. In case you were looking for more for the to-read list :).
Jennifer… Boy Meets Boy is one of the most brilliant examples of LGBT YA satire I’ve ever read! It’s one of my all-time favorite books, and I have such a deep and special love for it, and for Paul and Noah. I loved the way it skewered all those awful high school stereotypes – I mean, Infinite Darlene? QB and homecoming queen extraordinaire, Harley riding cheerleaders…brilliant.
I always recommend it wholeheartedly, with the disclaimer, “unless you don’t have a seriously wonky sense of humor.” I think you have to have one to fully appreciate how special a book it is. :)
I read this and The Perks of Being a Wallflower, back to back. Talk about polar opposite books, but “Perks” is also another of my fave YA books of all time.
I read a lot and probably read close to 700 books (of which 95% are m/m) in the past 2.5 years. Prior to this I had never read more than a half dozen rommance books. I started reading, thanks to my mother, when I was 7 and seldom find myself without a book since that tine. Now I’m 76 and a gay white male. As a result I found m/m exciting. However, there are times when some books become tiresome. I love a good story and have found too many books boring – not because of the story, but because the lack of a story, In stead too many center around sex. Now I’m not against sex, but when it covers half or more of the books content – it’s a little much. Some writers like Mark Roeder have written many books that have great stories and only hint at sex leaving a little to ones imagination.
A few month’s ago I read “arron” by JP Barnaby. The story was so compelling that I can’t forget it and hopefully we’ll see more.
Anyway that’s enough for now. You do a fantastic job with your reviews.
Hugs,
Jay
First of all, Jay, I love your mom. I’m a huge supporter of the initiative to get kids reading as early and as often as possible, so good on her for instilling the love of books in you from such an early age!
Okay, I’m going to step in it here, I just know it, but what I’m about to say will be said with every effort to be as diplomatic as possible. Here goes:
As I said, I try not to keep my finger on the pulse of internet controversy. I don’t even want a pinky tip on it to be honest, because ultimately all I want is for people to just get along.
A couple of years ago, there was an article at Lamda Literary–I’m not even going to link to it because it was so scathing, and the comments were so bitter that it was just ugly, but here’s a direct quote from the article to give you an idea of the tone of the piece:
I stayed out of the fray, I’ve always been more of a lurker than a participator anyway, but as a straight woman who would never, ever consider marginalizing anyone’s sexuality for the sake of titillation, I can tell you I was so disturbed by the whole thing that it made me believe for a while that maybe I was doing the very thing I didn’t want to do, and that there was something not altogether “normal” about my love for the genre. Did straight women discovering Gay Fiction/MM Romance bring about the decimation of the entire genre?! I had to wonder, and do you know what my answer was? Maybe, according to some of those comments I read. BUT it’s a maybe with some important conditions IMHO. Maybe female writers don’t have an accurate read on exactly what it means to be a gay man, because let’s face it; men and women see the world through different eyes and unless you’re a gay man, you’ve never really walked a mile in a gay man’s shoes, but does that mean that women don’t have a finger on the pulse of the human condition? Absolutely not. We are different, but we’re also fundamentally, whittling us down to our most basic form, the same. Let me put it this way–should male authors not be permitted to write a book in which a female character has been sexually assaulted simply because he will never know what it means to be a woman who’s been sexually assaulted? No–it’s called empathy.
I do believe, however, that there are some straight female readers of M/M Romance who’ve shined a negative light on the rest of us. These are the women we were discussing earlier who negatively review a book because it doesn’t include enough sex. What happens then? The author writes more books and those books include enough sex to satisfy the readers who demand it, which, in turn, sacrifices storyline for those of us who want it. Meanwhile, the sex becomes rote. All together now, how many fingers… You get my point. I’d rather read about the emotions of an intimate scene than the mechanics. Since when did the mechanics become interesting?
So, here we are, those of us out here who, while I’m not even going to sit here and lie and say I don’t want any sex in my fiction, want the sex to serve a purpose in the plot, whether that purpose is nothing more than for the characters to discover that a life of empty, meaningless, and nameless one-offs is the way in which he discovers that he’s not being fulfilled and needs something more. I mean, let’s face it; we’re sexual beings, each and every one of us. It’s the most intimate connection two people can have with one another, so romance breeds sex. The question is how much do we want to see on screen. Honestly, I don’t think there’s a single right answer to that question. It is entirely personal.
At any rate, all that leads me to this: I really started exploring the differences between books I was reading authored by straight women, bisexual women, trans men, gay men, and the conclusion I came to is that authors don’t write with their genitalia. Writers write from their hearts and minds and life experiences and the ability to feel compassion for each other, which isn’t to say that because it’s fiction it doesn’t have to be authentic–creative license only goes so far in contemporary romantic fiction–but really, all I want is to feel the emotional connection between the characters. I want to be able to believe the two people belong together, and that doesn’t happen through sex. It happens through emotion and dialogue and common bonds and shared experience, just like in real life, with a healthy sex life being the icing on the proverbial cake.
I don’t think women have bastardized M/M Romance. I think women have just brought a different perspective to the table. I hope all the men out there will continue to tolerate our presence and will give us all the chance to get it right. :)
One, thank you for the compliment, those are some kind words.
I come from the camp that there are only seven stories in the world and they have all been told many, many times before. The jock/nerd is simply a play on Romeo and Juliet and an object lesson about loving the wrong person. I don’t think as writes we can write new stories, we can only move the “camera” into places no one has been before. To me this is all about characters, it is the journey of THESE people who make it interesting, not the actual plot itself since short of blowing up the school I am not going to come up with something new.
If a reader can love a character, and they need to because if i am asking this fictional person to love them and you can’t, there is no way you will ever agree with the story again, they can forgive going down a road they’ve been down before. Not because they are seeing something new but because the conversation on the way there is more than worth it.
As for people demanding sex being put into gay fiction because it is expected…I don’t even want to tell you the reviews I have gotten about young adult books I have written not having enough sex so they won’t be continuing. I read a ton of books growing up and the ones that were age appropriate, didn’t seem packed cover to cover with sex, not sure why gay stories are expected to. But that is just a sore subject with me.
Hi John! Um… I didn’t think you’d actually see my gushing when I wrote it, but since it’s out there, yes, Kyle and Brad have set the benchmark for me in the jock/nerd category. :) I agree with you 1000% that at this stage of the game, pretty much everything and everyone has an archetype that can be traced back through the ages of recorded storytelling, through classical mythology, through fairy/folktales. Contemporary fiction simply modernizes the themes, and I think what people may be more tired of isn’t necessarily the tropes but the skill of the author to engage the reader in a well plotted story.
YA fiction is my go-to when I want a break from Adult romance. As far as the sexual content in YA fiction goes, I have to say the book I semi-reviewed in this post is, IMHO, Young Adult erotica. In fact, if it weren’t for the characters’ ages, I wouldn’t even call it YA, but maybe that’s a different topic altogether–where is the line between YA and Adult fiction? Honestly, though, I’m not suggesting I’m so naive as to believe teenagers don’t have sex, but the question for me is how much detail I want in the engaging of it, and the answer to that is I’d rather see it fade to black, though that probably has a lot more to do with my age than anything else. :)
Well I think there needs to be talk about sex, because at this age kids are talking and engaging in sexual activities. The problem I find is, what does it add to the book? I mean we are already being pretty voyeuristic following these people’s lives and thoughts, I am not sure we need to follow them into the bedroom. If you were describing a dark kind of encounter, where it would scar the character, then yes I think it should be put down so the reader can know what happened and how it felt to the character. But in the broad strokes, what does it add to the show?
Mr. and Mrs. Brady had to have had sex. I mean they both had three kids a piece, no chance they are unfamiliar in the way sex works. We saw their bedroom, their bed and even them reading in bed. What is gained from a story by keeping the lights on metaphorically when they have sex? If people are reading these stories to see sex, then I think they are missing the point by about a thousand miles. Erotica is fine and it has a place in the market and I don’t begrudge it one bit. But I do get upset when someone reads one of my books and leaves a complaint of. “Great writing, awesome imagination, not enough sex for me to keep reading.” I want to answer back. “Please don’t read anything I write again then, because there will never be sex in it for sex’s sake.”
I just got done writing a novel for the character of Tyler, the sporting goods store guy who takes brad under his wing in the first book. It is an adult book dealing with adult themes and it talks about sex and even the kind of sex they have. But in no way are we going to watch it blow by blow. That’s can’t add anything to the story in my mind and I think that people out there need to ask themselves, did they walk away from Harry Potter going, damn good book, which they’d had a threesome. Or I never felt the feeling Dorthy had for the Scarecrow were full developed and I wish they had gone farther on the page…
These things would never be said for mainstream books and the few times they were they;d be laughed out of the room. Yet when we say it is a GBLT YA book, then it suddenly because expected for someone to show a little skin in the game for it’s not worth it. And that’s not fair. Least not in my mind.
John, if you’d ever consider authoring a blog post on the subject, I’d happily post it here on my site. It’s an interesting subject that’s in many ways altogether different than discussing how much is too much sex in Adult romance, and I think it’s a great topic for debate. Obviously, I fall on the side of wanting no sex in my YA, but clearly there are people out there who do. I’d be interested to hear both sides and weight the pros and cons of it.